Toy Story 4 is the simplest but also the strangest entry of Pixar's flagship franchise

You would not be wrong to ask if Pixar tried his luck, opening the toy box again. After all, the studio, one of the last in Hollywood to truly deserve the title of "Dream Factory", has already reached the ideal conclusion of its flagship saga. Even those, like this grumpy critic, who have seen a bit of dramatic dismissal in almost ten years Toy Story 3 should have admitted that the second suite left Woody, Buzz and the rest of the bedroom gang in a perfect place, after pushing them to the precipice of fiery oblivion, then to a big gooey gooey , perfectly chosen to reduce those who grew on these characters in the form of puddle. Who else other than Disney stakeholders needed more? Let the sleeping dogs sleep.

Again Toy Story 4Pixar's new Whirligig technological wonder is not a cheap discount, but a happy Happy Meal price that replaces the craftsmanship of its predecessors. Despite its dubious necessity, the film returns to the bittersweet magic of the family's most existential franchises, where life is hard and where you are then locked in the attic, donated to a charity or dumped. the Toy Story movies are state-of-the-art, breathtaking entertainment devices, which are basically tragicomedies of neurosis about the inner life (and fears and desires) of sensitive toys. The basic pleasures of this fourth opus can be both more hectic and more worn, but the film preserves, at least, the pathology from his series: this concern to find meaning and your own place on the set.

Is there an identity crisis more hilarious than the realization of Buzz Lightyear, in the first Toy Storythat his main purpose – all his reason for being – is to submit to the capricious whims of a child? If we can believe it, Toy Story 4 proposes a more pathetic creation, putting the accent on create part. Presented by Tony Hale, in a strangled Buster Bluth cry, Forky is a plastic spork with wide eyes, limb wire and a burning certainty not to be a toy, but simply old garbage, destined to be thrown away. the bin. . This is the work of Bonnie, the adorable toddler with her buttons, who has become, for the most part, the new Andy at the end of Toy Story 3– the only child that our manufactured protagonists live to exalt. In his primitive rapprochement with a stick figure of a physical and his downright suicidal obsession with his own availability, Forky is also a kind of grotesque parody of other toys and their needs. It could even be called the greatest mistake of God, God in this case being identified as a child of kindergarten doubly unconscious.

Smartly, Pixar has always kept the central metaphor of Toy Story malleable and imperfect; we can see all sorts of relationships – family, romantic or otherwise – in the eternal devotion of toys to their owners. In Toy Story 4, the subtext becomes more weird and more messy. Woody (Tom Hanks), the aging but ageless cowboy doll, ends up playing the role of fortune parent for Forky, mainly for fear of not having survived his usefulness to Bonnie. (He's still a little hooked on Andy too – just one of the many emotional tensions that resonate in this 100-minute movie.) Woody's tireless tutelage ultimately drives him, during a family trip, in both settings Main Movie: A small bargain store in town and the noisy carnival in the street. Curiously, the shop becomes the most treacherous labyrinthine backdrop, with narrow passages behind the shelves, a voracious domestic cat and even the equivalent of the animated film Star wars Cantina, hidden in a pinball machine.

It is during the extended pit-stop that Toy Story 4 reintroduces a former player, a figure from Woody's past: Bo Peep (Annie Potts), the porcelain shepherd doll offered by Andy's mother between the second and third slices. (The film begins with a look back into the night, a moving exchange in an apocalyptic rainstorm that shows how sophisticated computer animation is, in its ability to render a texture both environmentally and emotionally .) Bo Peep has never been so three-dimensional. toys in Andy's room but in Toy Story 4Potts reinvents her as a takeaway survivor, released by life on the road and her lack of attachment to a single child. For Woody, increasingly tied to her responsibilities to Bonnie and her "child," Bo Peep's self-sustaining independence offers an alternative perspective. That is, in other words, the first Toy Story film to challenge the gospel of the franchise, his lasting faith in the imbalanced link between a child and his playmate "inanimate".

Bo Beep is certainly one of the most adapted characters of living and neurotic figurines crossing Toy Story 4The plot is hectic and busy. True to its name, the film continues to launch new toys on the screen, in the manner of a child who paces up and down in the stores. Keanu Reeves, a memorable star of the moment, lends her unparalleled zen cadence to Duke Caboom, a fun figurine of Canadian stuntmen. Finally, Jordan Peele and Keegan Michael Key will also perform indiscriminately improvised shtick, stuffed animals tied to the carnival prize and fantasizing – in the film's most inspired racing gag – to give up the trick and get throw on their human masters. But this being a Toy Story film, they are all occasionally melancholic creatures, clinging to the children who owned them or to those who never possessed them. This includes the film's nominal villain, a doll (Christina Hendricks) who dominates the antique store as a disturbed heiress, haunted by her loneliness, and commands a small team of voiceless veiled mannequins. It is frightening, but also the shadow of the antagonists of the past – another bitter object without any affection.

Directed with talent by the helmsman for the first time at Pixar, Josh Cooley, drawn from a story with no less than six recognized authors (including Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, who would have conceived the angle of the frame between romance and reunion, several earlier versions), Toy Story 4 is so fast and so light that it's easy to ignore that it's a pretty minor adventure – the least substantial of the series, so far. The feeling of danger, of being small and vulnerable in an oversized world, is not entirely obvious. Parents and children heading to the movie in search of their own meeting may be disappointed by the marginalization of the core set: Woody's persistent fear of being replaced by some brilliant thing and new gets an ironic realization of the way Toy Story 4 relegates Rex, Hamm, potato heads, Jessie and the rest of the original cast at the back of the seat. Even Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), Woody's first contest for teenage affection, has not much to do, although there is at least a slight philosophical tension in his subplot, in which the thick space ranger confuses his preprogrammed slogans. ethical navigation system, the "inner voice" of his cowboy boyfriend speaks.

It is probably for the best that no one here involved has attempted to match the fatalism and even the Toy Story 3; There would not have been the best of that film's twin, the times when Pixar forced his beloved creations to almost meet their creator, and then say goodbye to the boy who was giving meaning to their lives. Toy Story 4 It's a shorter affair, going to an end that suggests that some flies fear full lachrymation, and that leads to a concluding note that the film hardly seems to pretend that it will really hold this time. Yet the relative insecurity that the series has always found in its pint-sized heroes – the quality that makes them more human than the humans they worship, regardless of what their stamps manufacturing read – blazes through all crevices and cracks in the G-rated material. Toy Storyin other words, remains a particularly attractive audience for the crowd. In this case, it is also a rather strange case, co-titled as it is by a utensil with a desire of death. We are no longer in Andy's room.